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It's Official: The Establishment Is Panicked (But Is It Really a Revolution?)

February 10, 2016

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Well, it's now official. Panic has set in. Panic has set in maybe in both establishments, but certainly in the Republican establishment, panic is now official. And it's all because, up until last night, everything was theoretical. But now Trump won, and he outperformed the polling. But before you get too crazy, I want to remind you of something. People are talking about a revolution going on out there, and I can understand why people might be saying so when you look at Bernie Sanders over Hillary, and Trump coming out of nowhere and dominating the Republican side.

I don't know about a revolution. I mean, it's tempting and it's exciting to think that a revolution's going on, but I'm not so sure. Do you know that Mitt Romney got more, like a higher percentage of the primary vote in New Hampshire in, what was it, 2012, that Trump got last night. Romney got 39.3%. Trump got 35%. Does that equal a revolution? Don't misunderstand me here, folks. Don't go off half crazy on me yet here. We still have three hours to make sense of everything, and we will. If there was a revolution going on, would Trump have not won Iowa? I'm not saying that it's not real.

Let me cut to the chase. I really think what's going on here on the Republican side -- and it's been the case for the past seven years. The explanation for all of this is the fact on the Republican side, the explanation for all of it. It's not complicated. The Republican Party has not pushed back against Obama. The Republican Party has not tried to stop one shred of this, not really. I mean, you have to emphasize they haven't even hardly made a pretense of trying to stop any of this. So what you have is a genuine outrage at the Republican Party, but does that mean people out there want to overturn the entire system in a revolutionary way. I don't know that that's the case. But clearly the Republican Party's being rejected. The Republican Party establishment's being rejected.

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RUSH The Drive-Bys are so out of whack. The Huffing and Puffington Post, in their cover today, just dumps all over the voters of New Hampshire as a bunch of xenophobic, racist, bigot...

Well, other names I can't mention, but they're so ticked. The New York Daily News: "Dawn of the Brain-Dead," with a picture of Trump on the cover as the Joker from Batman. So when the media starts insulting and blaming the voters as being stupid idiots, you know that full-fledged panic has set in. Because this means that they are unable to control the outcome. And that is what the media lost when they lost their monopoly.

Their inability now to control the outcome, to control the message, to control how people vote, to control what people think, to control what people's opinions are. It's all out the window, and everybody that considers themselves to be part of the establishment is facing a major, big-time rejection today. On the Republican side, this would not be happening had there been some official, real, serious, consistent push-back to Obama.

Now, it didn't happen, so I don't want to sit here and play what-if. That's not what I'm doing. I'm offering you an explanation for why. In other words, I don't... Folks, you have these people talking about whether it's populism and nationalism overtaking conservatism, and I don't think we're there yet. Support for Trump is said to be, you know, outside all known categories. "It's outside conservatism, it's outside liberalism, it's outside libertarianism, it's outside moderates, it's outside independents. It's a new area."

It may well be, but it's made up of people from across the spectrum who are just fed up there's not an opposition party. Had there been an opposition party these past seven years to invest in, they would have. Had there been an opposition party that was serious about it, this would be an entirely different primary circumstance, scenario. But it isn't, and it is what it is. So we'll follow this along, and it's satisfying in a schadenfreude kind of way to read some of the establishment reaction and to listen to them on television.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Let's review some of the coverage here, show you just exactly what happened last night, before we hit the audio sound bites and get into your phone calls. As I said, the Huffing and Puffington Post just went absolutely nuclear after Trump won last night. By the way, the establishment on both sides has been rocked, but the Republican establishment I think was still living in fantasy, up until last night. They were still hoping something would happen; that Trump was not gonna win this. It was all theoretical.

Now hard, cold reality has settled in, and there's abject panic. They don't know who to go to! They don't know who to line up behind. Doesn't look like Rubio is gonna be able to do it, although he's not finished. But they had high hopes. Do they want to try to marshal their forces behind Kasich? They may have no choice, because they will not go to Cruz. They despise Cruz and Trump equally. In fact, they may even despise Ted Cruz even more, and Cruz is the guy with the legitimate chance here as we go forward to wrest control of this from Trump.

Christie, I think, is out. I don't know if he's made it official. I saw a couple headlines earlier that indicate that opinion. So who is he going to endorse? That will be the next question that they try to solve. But, anyway, the establishment don't know what to do now. Jeb, that's where all their eggs were. That's basket. And Jeb just couldn't do it, and that's the symbolic way he was just cut away from after only 30 seconds of his speech last night for Trump just codified all of this in 30 seconds.

It told the story of what's gone wrong here for the establishment in 30 seconds. So who do they back now? The great thing for Trump here is that New Hampshire did not winnow the field, other than Christie and Dr. Carson. He had five people quit his campaign this morning and join the Cruz campaign. So Dr. Carson is, for all intents and purposes, out. Fiorina. But none of them other than Christie have officially withdrawn. The field was not winnowed. Rubio's not going anywhere yet.

Jeb is not gonna go anywhere yet. Jeb's already making speeches South Carolina. So the Trump phenomenon rolls on because his opposition is split. There is no single candidate for the opposition to Trump to unify behind. This was such a victory for Trump last night in so many different ways. And one of the big ones was that New Hampshire did not change the makeup. It did not make the field any smaller among those with legitimate, quasi-legitimate opposition to Trump. So he's sitting pretty. And he has a huge...

He's been spending a lot of time in these Southern states. He's been doing a lot of appearances and a lot of rallies, and so has Ted Cruz. The Huffing and Puffington Post on the Democrat side, they're just beside themselves. They cannot believe the voters are this stupid. Their cover story says that New Hampshire has gone racist, sexist, and xenophobic. They start blaming the voters, folks. When the left starts blaming voters, then you know that they are losing control. Now, let's look at exit polls versus the outcome on the Republican side.

According to the exit polls, Trump won among men, he won among women, he won all age-groups, he won all income groups. He won urban, he won suburban, he won rural. Every issue group. Doesn't matter what the issue is, he won it. Gun owners, non-gun owners, Second Amendment, anti-Second Amendment. He won them all. Voters who call themselves "very conservative," Trump won them. Those who call themselves "moderates," too. Trump won every group. This is exit polling.

And he did it in ways that the establishment can't diminish. He did it in ways that they can't say, "Well, it's not real. Well, it's phony." You know, they all tried to get Trump on the expectations game. Everything they tried to do to discredit Trump beforehand has blown up in their faces. They were relying on the fact that Trump did not win Iowa. So they're telling themselves, "He's not real. If Trump was real, if this was really real, Trump would be 50% everywhere."

This is what they're still telling themselves today in many cases. Now the Washington Post: "Donald Trump Loves Winning and He Won Just About Every Group in New Hampshire -- New Hampshire is very different [from Iowa]. It's a state with more independents, fewer conservatives and fewer evangelicals. (In Iowa, nearly two-thirds of Republicans identified that way, compared to a quarter in New Hampshire...) So that meant that Trump could do poorly with conservatives and still triumph.

"And so he did, winning despite ... winning only a third of the 'very conservative' vote." I have been warning the Republican establishment since the first days of the Trump campaign that Trump's message was going to resonate precisely because the Republican Party ceased being an opposition party. And while they were all thinking that nobody would accept this -- that they would abandon Trump because he's too uncouth, too unpredictable, he's too brash, braggadocios -- I kept trying to warn them every day, starting last June.

"You people do not get it. You don't get the connection he's got with people that support him. You don't understand at all because you live in your cocoon inside the Beltway, in the establishment, wherever -- New York, Washington -- and you really don't get it. Everywhere you go, everybody's happy. Everywhere you go, everybody's doing well. There's no unemployment. People are making a lot of money. You get up, you have a job to go to every day. You go to nice dinner every night.

"Everything's cool. Everybody's house is nice. You go to parties a lot. Everything's cool. But that's not what's happening in the rest of the country." They were sitting there thinking that all of these characteristic traits would eventually cause Trump to dwindle. And my point was, "You people in the Republican side had better understand something: He's putting together a coalition that you claim to want. I mean, your stated reason for not opposing Obama is you need Hispanic votes."

This is why they tell us they have to not push-back on amnesty and illegal immigration and comprehensive immigration reform. "No, no. We can't! The Hispanic vote." We keep hearing Lindsey Grahamnesty say it every night of the week up in New Hampshire. And how are they gonna do it? What's the Republican Party plan for going out and reaching this new constituency? Not criticizing Obama. Not criticizing Obama and claiming to be for or supportive of the same things Obama is.

That, somehow, was magically going to cause voters that support Obama to abandon him and the Democrats and migrate to the Republican Party. Meanwhile, here's Trump running against everything going on in Washington and declaring that what's going on in Washington is incompetent and being performed by a bunch of hacks that are only in it for themselves, and he's put together a coalition that covers every group, demographic and otherwise, that you can think of. And among the smallest in his group is conservatives.

That's why he can win big in New Hampshire with taking not very big percentage of the conservative vote because his coalition is so big and made up of so many other different groups of people. He won only a third of the "very conservative" vote. "Among evangelical voters, Trump and Cruz were basically tied." Who in the world would predict that? Who in the...? After Cruz comes and dominates Iowa and does so on the basis of evangelical voters. And Trump, you know, "Two Corinthians walk into a bar..." Donald Trump, "Two Corinthians this," and, "The Bible? The Bible kills it, except my book."

And yet evangelicals' support for Trump tied with Ted Cruz in New Hampshire.

This was the scale of Trump's win.

Trump won, the exit polls were right. Trump won men. He won women. He won every age group. He won every ideology. Liberal, conservative, moderate, Libertarian. Every group Trump won a majority of voters. He won among people who had gone to college and people who hadn't. He won among people who only had a high school education; he won among people who did not have a high school education. He won every single age bracket. He won those groups by huge margins. He won men 3-to-1 over second place finisher. Women he won 2-to-1. Voters under 30 he won 2-to-1.

Nearly 40% of those who had not attended college voted Trump. A third of those who had attended college voted Trump. This is what the Republican Party's been telling us they need to win. I've had 'em come to my office. I've told you. I've had Rand Paul here, Mitt Romney's here. One thing they've all said in common is that Republican Party can't win with Republican votes alone anymore. We have to branch out, we have to reach out. This is what they were telling me to prepare me for some of the campaign tactics that I was gonna see. That they were gonna have to reach out and immigration was one of the ways of reaching out, supporting amnesty.

Well, all along Trump has built that coalition the Republican Party claims to want and they're out there badgering it and bashing it. It's exactly what they claim to want. They could have had it. The Republican Party could have had the Trump coalition. They could have had it at health care. A majority of Americans opposed Obamacare from the get-go. The Republican Party could have seriously attempted to form an alliance with the Tea Party and the anti-Obamacare people and been a dominant majority party on that issue alone. And then on subsequent issues to come down the pike the Republican Party could have formed an alliance with majorities in other areas of opposition, and they didn't.

The Trump coalition could have been the Republican Party. They couldn't do it because they thought it was all conservative. They couldn't do it because they thought the Tea Party was a bunch of hayseed hicks who believe in pro-life politics and they just couldn't do it, they just couldn't build a bridge. Whatever it is, fear of social issues, dislike of conservatism, not wanting to get in bed with people who want the government to be smaller and less intrusive in people's lives, whatever it was, they couldn't do it. And now, because they didn't do it, there's Donald Trump.

Donald Trump has the exact coalition the Republican Party, to a man, has told me they need to win, that they need to thrive. And now they're reduced to bashing it by virtue of bashing Trump. And now they're reduced to bashing it by virtue of bashing Cruz. The two people who are showing the Republican Party all they had to do all these past seven years, but they didn't. They purposely, strategically, tactically refused to push back, refused to make a spectacle of stopping Obama, and they have themselves to blame for this predicament.

People are not gonna donate and donate and vote and vote and hear the right things during campaigns, the promises to stop Obama, to oppose Obamacare, to seriously make an effort to repeal it. Even if they don't have the votes to override a veto, the effort, all it would have taken was the effort, all it would have taken was put the onus on Obama, make Obama illustrate that all this is his fingerprints. No such strategy was ever seen.

So is it a revolution? Well, yeah. I mean, it's a revolution against the Republican establishment, no question. And on the Democrat side you could say the same thing with Bernie Sanders. But the pro-revolution groups that are out touting that have to combine Bernie Sanders and Trump's voters to make their point that there's a revolution here. Be wary of that, folks. What good does that do us? If you want to say, "Yeah, man, look at the electorate, people are fed up with America, you combine the Bernie supporters and the Trump supporters, you've got an anti-Washington revolution."

What good do Bernie's voters do us? Who the hell wants to align with them? What's the point of bringing them into that? I think it kind of misses the point to go there to have to make your point of revolution. You don't have to do that. It's not complicated here.